Dr. Peter Gold, Ph.D.

Symptoms Treated

Anxiety
Depression
Anger
Grief and loss
Trauma – emotional, physical, and sexual
Life stage transitions
Divorce
Kids coping with difficult parent and school situations
Social and emotional difficulties in school
Individuation–the process of becoming more of who you are
Spiritual issues and difficulties
Existential confusion and despair
Couples’ issues related to infidelity, intimacy, co-dependence

Services

Counseling for Adults, Adolescents and Kids

Offering a trauma informed, mind-body approach to mental health, I help you work beneath the surface of symptoms to understand, address and transform the deeper dynamics that cause them. The goal is a shift in not just they way you think, but more importantly the way you feel in your relationship with others and yourself.

How Therapy Works

What You Do:

Come just as you are. Anxiety, depression, anger, confusion, despair and grief--all are welcome, and are great entry points into the deeper areas of you that produce these symptoms. The psyche needs to be seen and heard just as it is. If it is not, or if it is disparaged, its demands and accompanying symptoms will usually become louder and more insistent. I help you to embrace whatever state you find yourself in by providing a safe place to be present with what is going on for you now. This often provides the foundation for you to go deeper so that real shifts can happen.

What I Do:

The goal is to help you gain more influence over how you experience yourself, others, and the world so that life becomes easier, more satisfying, and more meaningful. Safety and trust are indispensable to this process and together provide the foundation of your work with me. By creating a comfortable, effective, and sometimes humorous atmosphere, our relationship serves as the bedrock from which we explore past experiences and process current situations. By uncovering the internal dynamics that create pain and conflict, you can transform these dynamics into a more harmonious network of well-being.

What We Do:

Through traditional talk-therapy and sometimes psychologically oriented forms of qigong (meditative movement similar to tai chi), I help you explore your psyche’s structures and their influence on your experience the present. With some people talking is the best and only form of therapy. With other people qigong supplements talk therapy. I use qigong when it fits into the flow of sessions or when people specifically request it. Sessions are always trauma informed. In my personal and professional experience qigong facilitates a level of change deeper than talk therapy alone can provide. Qigong is always an option, never a necessity.

Length and Frequency

Weekly sessions of 50 minutes are standard. If you would like longer or more frequent sessions I am happy to talk about a session length and frequency that is best for you.

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”

-Japanese proverb

Kids

Kid Therapy

When challenges and difficulties arise, kids want a safe and protected space to talk to someone they like and trust. As a therapist I provide this space.

The goal of kid therapy the way I practice it (primarily through Gestalt Play Therapy) is to create more self-awareness, integration and resilience so that kids have more tools for emotional expression and additional ways of getting their needs met.

The therapeutic process is relational and dialogic and takes place in the here and now of the present moment. It is also experiential and experimental, and provides a relationship in which kids have new experiences of themselves. This approach to therapy for children and adolescents makes it alive and fun for your kiddo.

It has been said that toys are words for kids and play is there language. I use a lot of toys and games in therapy to help kids express themselves in new and more accurate ways. Play therapy also helps kids reclaim old disowned parts of themselves while encouraging them to discover new and resourceful parts.

Over the course of our work together kids become more of who they are, continuing on their developmental path from a more resourced and resilient place. This helps them better manage and enjoy their lives outside of the therapy office.

“Helping the child become aware of her process is a prime goal of the Gestalt therapist. As a child becomes more aware of her functioning in the therapy experience—who she is, what she feels, what she likes and does not like, what she needs, what she wants, what she does, and how she does it—she becomes aware and integrated. She has more choice for emotional expression, getting her needs met, and for exploring new behaviors. This awareness happens through the various experiences and experiments that the therapist provides in the process of play therapy.”

-Violet Oaklander, Play Therapy in Action

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

-William Shakespeare

The people I work with seek counseling because they realize something could be better. There is a part in all of us that knows how to best take care of ourselves. It is that part that brings us to therapy and guides us through the changes we need.